Books: The Grand Race

THE DOORBELL RANG by Rex Stout. 186 pages. Viking. $3.50.

In an age when the mystery novel is designed more for the economy-class airline traveler than for the home armchair reader, Rex Stout’s way has not changed. After 31 years, Nero Wolfe is still 286 Ibs. large, still guzzles at least a dozen beers and tends his orchids for precisely four hours daily, still abhors leaving his Manhattan house on business, and never goes near a sports car or chases a blonde. While thus ignoring Bondomania and its sibling rivals, Stout and Wolfe are doing just fine. If The Doorbell Rang holds true to recent form, it will sell at least 60,-000 hardback copies and 1,000,000 in paperback.

This time Nero takes on the “whole, damn Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He does it mostly because he is offered the biggest fee he has ever had, and this promises months and months of gourmandizing before he would need to go back to work. His client is a middle-aged widow who has sent friends and bigwigs thousands of copies of a book attacking the FBI. Ever since, the G-men have been following and harassing her. She wants Nero to make them lay off. The fat genius plunges in, following a tortuous, tightly plotted path until a nifty stunt finally traps two agents breaking and entering his house. With that for leverage, he can “push in J. Edgar Hoover’s nose” and get the FBI off his client’s innocent back.

Casting the FBI as villain has brought Author Stout publicity he has not had in years. It just seemed to make a good plot, he says, though admitting that “I think the untrammeled power of FBI is subversive to the American democratic idea.” Normally, he does not let his views suffuse his mysteries. “By the age of 47,” says the spare, spiny-bearded author, who is now 78, “I had written four so-called serious novels that had got some critical praise. But I realized that I was not and never would be a great writer. I had decided, though, that I was a pretty good storyteller—so I decided what the hell, I’d just tell stories.” He has done it well enough to have earned $1,500,000 over the years, without having had to sell to TV (“I can’t stand the goddamn thing”). And two professors are even writing a scholarly treatise on Wolfe, “though I can’t imagine what they’ll find to say.”

Stout once said all that he thinks is important to say. A good mystery writer, he wrote, merely tells the reader: ” ‘Let’s run a race. Here goes my mind, I’m off, see if you can catch me.’ ” In Doorbell, even FBI fans will have to admire his agility.